African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (review)

As has repeatedly been pointed out, the center of gravity of world Christianity in recent decades has shifted away from Europe and the United States to Latin America and Africa, a process that in an intriguing way coincides with an increase in importance of Charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

David Maxwell's African Gifts of the Spirit is a timely contribution to the study of these developments. At the most general level, the book starts out from the observation that "much of the recent research on African Pentecostalism gives the impression that it is new to Africa," and it rectifies this mistaken impression by situating Pentecostalism "within the broader sweep of Africa's Christian history" (13). More particularly, the book combines historical and ethnographic methodologies in order to address two issues: first, to reconstruct the transnational roots, local beginnings, and diversifications of the Pentecostal movement in colonial and postcolonial southern Africa; and second, to provide the reader with a case study of an African Pentecostal church, the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA), which at present has a membership of more than one million with branches in a variety of African countries, the U.S., and Europe.

With regard to the history of Pentecostalism, Maxwell not only shows that from its (predominantly American) beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century Pentecostalism has been a spatially expansive project, involving the global dissemination of religious print media and the transnational movement of missionaries. Maxwell also makes clear that the early Pentecostal movement in southern Africa spread alongside existing Christian networks, where local people appropriated it in different and selective ways depending on sociocultural context and political situation. In retracing these developments, African Gifts of the Spirit elaborates how African Pentecostalists entered into complex and often ambiguous relationships with political agencies, "traditional" religionists, African Independent Churches, and other mission churches, in part distancing themselves from or competing with them, in part appropriating their symbolism for the purpose of self-legitimation.

Framed by and interwoven with this general discussion of Pentecostalism in southern Africa, most chapters of the book are devoted to an examination of the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA). This church developed in the late 1960s out of a small prayer band in urban Zimbabwe and in subsequent decades experienced a remarkable growth in membership numbers and spatial expansion. On the basis of oral accounts, publications, and administrative documents of the church, Maxwell reconstructs its multifarious history and shows, among other things, how egalitarian ideals came into conflict with authoritarianism and the increasingly clientelist leadership style of the church founder and principal prophet, Ezekiel Guti.

That the ZAOGA nonetheless attracts followers has to do with its emphasis on social reproduction and social mobility as well as the church's achievements in conveying to its members feelings of respectability and personal security. But the growth of the ZAOGA is also connected to the activities and influence of Guti himself, who received his theological training in Dallas in the 1970s and since that time has maintained his contacts with international (mostly American) Pentecostalists. These groups and individuals not only support the ZAOGA in theological matters but also provide external funding that has been used, for instance, to upgrade the church infrastructure. Ordinary members are not told where the money comes from, and these contributions do not come into conflict with the Pentecostal church's teachings on "self-reliance" or its "culture of industry and entrepreneurship" (95), both of which are notions, as Maxwell shows, that are congruent with neoliberal ideas.

This book is an excellent work and will be of special interest for scholars in the fields of religious studies, history, and anthropology as well as African studies. In combining an ethnography of contemporary church life with the analysis of historical data, Maxwell presents a wide-ranging account of the history of...